When I chose the Faculty of Civil Engineering, I didn’t know what the field of engineering meant. The choice came naturally, being used to spend my holidays with my cousin during high school coordinating a team of workers to build our family home. The experience was decisive in our subsequent choices since we both chose construction engineering, and now everyone has a career in this field.
After completing my university studies, I was involved in the design and execution of charitable investments within an NGO that deals with helping street children and needy families in Cluj-Napoca. Although the works were small, the two years spent in execution helped me permanently in my career. Also at that time I decided that my path is clearly towards the design of structures. This was followed by 7 years spent in a small design office whose projects were mainly made of metal structures. Strictly design moments were few only at the beginning of the projects, then being engaged in drawing.
Then I came to Popp & Asociații, first in 2012, to the office in Cluj-Napoca, and then to Bucharest. I chose Popp & Associates for the experience and important projects that are being carried out here, now considering that this is where I trained as an engineer. I found an environment that promotes professional development and I had the opportunity to collaborate with visionary engineers, who, although young, already had considerable experience.
The challenges encountered come with the size of the projects managed by Popp & Asociații. There is no project that does not require some particular computational approaches and solutions. There are projects in which innovative solutions are the only feasible ones and here the challenges increase exponentially. Thus, I came to deepen the technology of passive seismic systems, technology successfully implemented within the Orchid Towers project.
Young engineers must be persevering in the current design, but they must also be curious about new and innovative solutions, to study in detail ways of calculation even if at the time of deepening it may sometimes seem that they will not help. From my own experience, I believe that there is no deepening of a problem that I have not used during my career. If I didn’t apply that study directly, then the experience I learned helped me look at other calculations from another perspective that became routine at one point.